Combining Federation V2 and Istio Multicluster

In a previous post, we saw how to leverage Istio Multicluster to deploy an application (bookinfo) on multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters and apply mesh policies on all of the deployed services. We also saw that the deployment process was relatively complex. In this post we are going to see how Federation V2 can help simplify the process of deploying an application to multiple clusters.

Federation V2, as the name suggests, is the evolution of the Kubernetes Federation initiative, after the project was rebooted around the beginning of 2018. Federation V2 narrows the initial scope of Federation and focuses on creating a sophisticated and generic placing engine that, based on policies, is able to make decisions on whether and where to place arbitrary Kubernetes API objects. Federation V2 comes with a set of API objects pre-configured for federation, but others can be added.

This is a significant enhancement over V1 in which the set of federated objects was hardwired in the code and the federation project itself was always catching up with the Kubernetes code base. With the new model this problem goes away and we can also federate CRDs.

Source: openshift.com